That Closing Scene of the New Twin Peaks Was Worth the 25-Year Wait

After 25 years of waiting, we returned to the misty woods of Twin Peaks tonight. The two-hour premiere of the third season of Twin Peaks on Showtime was David Lynch at some of his weirdest. We saw evil Agent Cooper with his white trash wig. And we saw good Agent Cooper trapped in the Red Room with the backwards-talking Laura Palmer. We caught up with classic characters like the Log Lady and Lucy, plus a few appearances by the likes of Ashley Judd and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

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But while the new episode was mostly a slow, slow build (with thankfully little catchup), the final scene made it worth the wait. In the most pivotal moments of the original Twin Peaks, Lynch would bring us back to the Bang Bang Bar, where Julee Cruise and the house band would play blue-eyed dream pop. Sunday's first episode once again brought us back to the Bang Bang Bar, where, this time, Chromatics is the house band. The group, who contributed music to the show, plays "Shadow" in the episode's closing scene, where Shelly and James from the original cast are still hanging out.

If any band can carry the legacy of Twin Peaks's influential sound, it's Chromatics. The band perfectly captures the ethereal Lynchian mood, and in the context of this episode, sounds perfectly stuck in time. The faces on the show might have a few more lines and the hair a little grayer, but Twin Peaks as both a show and an idea has endured. And once we heard Chromatics play in that smoky bar, it finally felt real.

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